Writing a PAX East Enforcer Training Manual

October 22, 2011

Last year when I was preparing for PAX East, I signed up to be an Enforcer and worked to learn everything I could. I read through the forums, signed onto IRC, and asked lots of questions, but the experience was really frustrating. The response from most veterans was, “Read the forums!” but there isn’t a lot of organization there. The information you need is spread all over the place, and most people start their first year confused and trying to figure out where to go and what to do.

Since technical writing is a big part of my job, I thought it would be of help if I put together a training manual for Enforcers at PAX East. A lot of the information will be relevant to PAX Prime, but not all, so this is unique to East. Hopefully I can distill the information and put together something that people can read in advance or even carry with them to reference during the convention.

It certainly needs distilled… I’ve copied information into Scrivener from twenty or thirty threads this morning and ended up with 53 pages of data. There’s surprisingly little repetition in there, but it was so disorganized on the forum that there’s no way someone read through all of it before starting the job.

I haven’t gotten access to the wiki yet, and will hopefully find more information there, but I think I can put together a pretty comprehensive pre-PAX guide. There will still be a lot of training on-the-job, but I hope this will be of help to people next year.